PAPER has a habit of preferring artists to the usual roster of Pop culture celebrities, for the most part, and regularly turns to them in times of doubt. While the dust was still settling in the wake of 9/11, on the first day we were able to get back into our downtown offices, the publishers decided to scrap an entire issue to ask the many artists who lived in close proximity to the World Trade Center to visually respond to a world suddenly turned upside down — because we have always trusted artists to be the last sacred alchemists in our culture, able to make meaning through the most elemental act of questioning. For all our love of art, though, PAPER has never in its 25-year history done an “art issue.” We do it now because on some intuitive level we knew that at this pivotal time for the nation and the planet, on the eve of an election with such crucial consequences, we need art more than ever. As we live in a time of pluralism, when diversity reigns over the authority of any single orthodoxy, we didn’t want to presume to be definitive.

Here our favorite artists and players in the art world tell us who and what they care about now and why, and by doing so, give us much to think about in the wider community of ideas and sensibilities that ultimately bind us together. Terence Koh and Cecily Brown talk about sex and sexuality in art; the inimitable Tauba Auerbach writes a passage of scientific genius; Shepard Fairey visits the increasingly provocative and populated terrain of political art; and more — RoseLee Goldberg on Performance Art, Anne Pasternak on public art, Mark Tribe considers the world of digital art and representation, James Fuentes interviews Rob Pruitt on humor, Michael Nevin explores his love of drawing, Shirin Neshat addresses feelings of exile, and Marc Schiller talks art and commerce by revisiting his earlier thoughts on “The Banksy Effect.”